Locations: La Mixteca

With this documentary, we want to make public what took place between June and August of 2016, through the voices of the citizens, teachers, mothers, and municipal authorities of Oaxaca.

Since June of 2016 — ten years since the uprising that for more than six months this state in the south of Mexico participated in — professors and communities from the eight regions of Oaxaca returned to the streets.

Their main demand is the repeal not only of the educational reform, but also of the whole package of structural reforms better known as the “Pact for Mexico,” which the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto—under the influence of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank—has been trying to impose since 2013.

That was the state’s strategy: to create fear, weariness, and paralysis.

By Griselda SánchezDesinformémonos
July 14, 2016
Translated by Scott Campbell

June 19, 11:09:01pm – Are you ok?? Rumors are spreading here about a curfew. What do you know? Be careful, ok? We’re here if there’s something we can do to help. And in that way, more than 15 people from Mexico City sent me text messages or called to tell me that they were getting messages saying that there was – or would be – a power cut in the city of Oaxaca, that the police had already entered the main square (Zócalo) to remove the teachers who have had an encampment (plantón) there since May 15. I told them that I was listening to Radio Universidad and Radio Tu’un Ñuu Savi and that they weren’t saying these things. It was a very difficult day…In the morning, the State and Federal Police tried to remove the blockade of federal highway 190 maintained by teachers and parents in Nochixtlán. In that police operation nine people were killed by gunfire and there were dozens seriously wounded. For hours in the afternoon, in Hacienda Blanca and Viguera – the entrance to the state capital – two Federal Police helicopters bombarded with tear gas grenades the people who were resisting on the barricades in order to block the path of the police. These helicopters also fired on houses in the neighborhood and on the school where people had set up a first aid site to treat the wounded. My compañeros with independent media went to cover that location while I went to the Zócalo. I arrived in time to witness an informational meeting given by the teachers. The spokespersons informed us of what was happening a few kilometers from here. They indicated where barricades would be put up to protect the plantón, and also asked for calm and to pay no mind to the rumors. They said that moments before a woman passed by shouting: “They’re coming, the police have arrived!” – placing the plantón on alert, which like an anthill began to mobilize. The businesses abruptly shuttered. Some people approached the main table to deliver bags of medication, food, vinegar. It’s true, that afternoon reeked of uncertainty…and uncertainty and rumors are not a good combination because they spread rapidly, penetrating your skin and paralyzing you. That was the state’s strategy: to create fear, weariness, and paralysis.

The following documentary conveys the feelings and testimonies of the people that lived through the massacre that occurred in Nochixtlán on June 19, when the police killed at least 11 demonstrators. After various government attempts at negotiation with the families of the fallen, the people maintain their position of rejecting the Educational Reform and the structural reforms.

“We do not negotiate with our dead. Instead, we ask the federal government to leave and the state government to go with them, because they do not know how to govern the Oaxacan people,” said the mother of a family that was part of the dialogue commission of Nochixtlán with the federal government.

The morning of June 19, the Ministry of Public Security of Oaxaca (SSP-O) and the Federal Police (PF) perpetrated a coordinated attack to evict the highway blockade maintained by the students, teachers, and inhabitants of Nochixtlán. The result was 12 murdered, 27 arrested, 7 disappeared, and 45 injured, 37 by live ammunition from firearms.

AN ACT OF WAR THEY ARE TRYING TO HIDE

Faces illuminated by the heat of the barricade that would later be deprived of life. Tense days in Nochixtlán. A tense calm. In the mornings, the cold is accompanied by coffee, bread, or atole, the result of collective organization. By night, military harassment and the absence of sleep, but also music and a determination to defend education.

HUAJUAPAN DE LEÓN- Salvador Olmos García, a 27-year old vendor, community journalist, activist, defender of lands, vocalist and pioneer of the anarko-punk movement in Huajuapan, was found seriously injured this Sunday morning in the Las Huertas neighborhood of the city.

Around 4:40 this morning, rescue workers of the National Emergency Commission (CNE) were alerted by local police agents that that there was a seriously wounded person at an unnumbered building on Naranjos Street, so Ambulance 06 of District 020 was immediately dispatched to the spot.

When the paramedics arrived, they saw someone lying by the side of the road. They immediately gave him first aid and put him on a stretcher.